Germany Frees '85 Hijacker Who Killed American Sailor

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN; Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Frankfurt for this article, and David Johnston from Washington.

Published: December 21, 2005

German officials said Tuesday that they had released a Lebanese man jailed 19 years ago for killing an American Navy diver during the 1985 hijacking of a T.W.A. jetliner, an ordeal that shocked Americans during a tense 17-day standoff.

A State Department spokesman expressed disappointment with the decision to release the man, Mohammed Ali Hamadi, and vowed that the United States would pursue him and bring him to America to face justice for the murder of the diver, Robert Dean Stethem of Waldorf, Md. Mr. Hamadi was freed last Thursday and is now believed to be in Lebanon.

''We're going to make every effort to see that he stands trial here in the United States,'' said the spokesman, Sean McCormack. He added that the United States was ''talking to the Lebanese government'' about turning him over, though no extradition treaty exists between the two nations.

Mr. Hamadi, who was arrested in the Frankfurt airport in 1987, went on trial in Germany in 1989. The trial was closely watched in the United States, and the hijacking of T.W.A. Flight 847 from Athens to Rome came to be seen as one of the defining moments in the emergence of terrorism as a weapon by radical Arabs fighting against Israel and American influence in the Middle East.

The hijacking began when a group of gunmen seized the plane on June 14, 1985, killing Mr. Stethem and dumping his body on the tarmac of the Beirut airport two days later. It ended more than two weeks later when the final group of 39 hostages was released. Mr. Hamadi's fellow hijackers are thought to still be at large.

Mr. Hamadi's release by a German parole board comes at a troubled time for relations between Germany and the United States.

In recent weeks, there have been news reports that German territory was used by the C.I.A. in transferring terror suspects to secret prisons on European soil. A recent visit here by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was dominated by the question of those flights and by the American abduction and detention two years ago of a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, who was mistakenly believed to be a member of Al Qaeda.

Germany and the United States have cooperated closely on intelligence matters since the Sept. 11 attacks, but relations in some aspects of the effort against terrorism have been strained. Most conspicuously, German attempts to convict two suspects believed to have been members of the German-based Qaeda cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were foiled when the United States refused to allow information sought by the German courts to be used in their trials.

A Hamburg court acquitted one suspect, Abdelgani Mzoudi, when the United States refused to allow testimony by a jailed Qaeda suspect. Another man, Mounir el-Motassadeq, was convicted of belonging to a terrorist group, but acquitted of more serious charges of helping in a terrorist attack.

In the case of Mr. Hamadi, who remains under indictment in the United States in connection with the 1985 hijacking, American counterterrorism officials expressed irritation over the decision to parole him. The officials were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the details of a sensitive law enforcement question.

The American officials said they were aware that Mr. Hamadi would be granted a parole hearing at some point this year and had sought discussions with German security officials over the possibility of turning him over to the United States in the event he was released. But Mr. Hamadi flew to Lebanon before any agreement was reached, the officials said, adding that German officials had long expressed reservations about handing Mr. Hamadi over to the United States, where he might face the death penalty.

After Mr. Hamadi was arrested in Germany in 1987, the United States requested his extradition but Germany, worried about the fate of two German businessmen who had been kidnapped in Lebanon, rejected the request.

Instead, Mr. Hamadi was put on trial in Frankfurt in 1989, found guilty of Mr. Stethem's murder, and sentenced to the maximum under the law of what was then West Germany, life in prison with the possibility of parole after 15 years.

His release on Thursday came only a few days before a German archaeologist, Susanne Osthoff, was freed by a group that took her hostage in Iraq three weeks ago. German officials said there was no connection between the two cases.

A spokeswoman for the Frankfurt prosecutor's office, Doris M?r-Scheu, said Mr. Hamadi's release after he had served 19 years, was a result of a normal, mandatory parole board review of his detention.

''Everything was O.K. with him, the prison evaluation, the psychologist's and the prosecutor's,'' Ms. M?r-Scheu said, explaining the reasons for the decision to grant Mr. Hamadi parole.

At the time of Mr. Hamadi's conviction, the United States expressed satisfaction at the outcome of the case, with the White House spokesman at the time, Marlin Fitzwater, saying, ''Hamadi's sentence to life imprisonment satisfies the demand of justice and confirms that no cause or grievance excuses terrorism.''

''We expect that Hamadi will serve the full sentence in accord with German law,'' Mr. Fitzwater said.

But in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. McCormack said the United States was disappointed that Mr. Hamadi had not served out the entire term allowable by German law, which would have been 25 years.

When he was arrested while in transit at the Frankfurt airport, Mr. Hamadi was found to be carrying three bottles of a chemical explosive in his luggage.

In his trial, he was found guilty of the beating and murder of Mr. Stethem and also of participating in the savage beatings of two other passengers on the hijacked airplane. Normally in Germany, parole can be requested for people serving life sentences after 15 years in prison, but a court ruled that Mr. Hamadi would be eligible for parole only after serving 19 years.

The hijacked plane, whose captain, John Testrake, became a hero in the United States because of his coolness under pressure, twice flew back and forth between Algiers and Beirut before the 39 hostages being held were released at the end of the ordeal.

During the trial, no witness testified to having seen who fired the gun that killed Mr. Stethem. Mr. Hamadi, who was 22 at the time of the hijacking, claimed that the killing had been carried out by another hijacker.

But witnesses said that Mr. Hamadi held the murder weapon both before and after Mr. Stethem was killed, and that he helped to blindfold, ridicule and beat him.

Photos: Mohammed Ali Hamadi, left, was released by Germany on Thursday after serving 19 years of a life sentence for killing Robert Dean Stethem, a Navy diver, right, during the hijacking of the T.W.A. passenger jet. (Photo by Associated Press); (Photo by EuroNews, via Agence France-Presse); John Testrake, the pilot of a hijacked T.W.A. jetliner, in photo at left, was held hostage by an unidentified gunman at the Beirut airport in June 1985. At right, two of the gunmen who hijacked the plane sat on its wing at the airport. The hijacking ordeal ended after a 17-day standoff. (Photo by Joel Robine/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images); (Photo by Nabil Ismail/Agence France-Presse)